It had been a long, long time since she'd received a wound to make her stumble. Maybe the ambush that'd given her the scars along her back? Sure, she had worried that something in the war might be so dire (she had considered the possibility of dying, but, well... That was something best not thought of. Better to focus on the task at hand). She hadn't expected this. The wound wasn't so grave, sure, but she'd lost enough blood that her feet were a bit clumsy and she needed to stop the bleeding.

Oh, her tail, it felt.... It felt so strange. Moving it made it feet worse but she didn't know how to balance it anymore.

White paws, spotted with blood, carried her uneasily into the infirmary. Her mouth tasted like blood, but not her own, which meant she wasn't dying. It was a bit quiet there, for the moment, so she hardly felt bad about occupying their attention. Her head swung around to the first healer she saw, giving a guilty smile and taking a seat. "Hey, doc, ya- you mind patching me up? I think I left somethin' behind on the battlefield."

A joke. She gave a half-hearted laugh. Maybe her reckless confidence would help brighten the mood of other healers, even if the gory stump surely made it worse.

Treating patient after patient was a lot like stemming the flow of blood from a wound, Setebos had learned. Maybe that was his way of adapting to stress; framing insurmountable problems in a familiar language, as objective as bullet points on an itinerary. The struggling infirmary was becoming inundated with stragglers limping out from between the trees, and the lone two healers capable of rising to the occasion were quickly becoming overwhelmed in the surge of people. Setebos, in particular, had barely slept over the past few days. His precious hours were spent refilling the supplies that dwindled, watching the trees for intruders, and tending to his patients' needs. Prognosis was grim for some of them. All of those factors swarmed over him like a murder of crows, constantly pecking at his thoughts.

Setebos stared down at the fire that he was using to heat up a batch of white clover tea -- Saboro was utilizing poisons, and it was important to have some remedies in stock. A fragrant, silken trail of smoke was coiling from the translucent white concoction, the flowers cradled at the bottom of the makeshift cup warping under the intense heat. He tried to focus on the minutiae of that visual to lift himself out of his exhaustion. He tried to feel like the steam wafting from the white clover brew; weightless and airy, rising over his worldly burdens. It was a pointless mantra that he would, eventually, dismiss as being utterly ridiculous. In the throes of what was quite obviously sleep deprivation so profound that he had crossed the threshold of exhaustion and ascended, kicking and screaming, into a form of hyperactivity, even simple bullcrap like that seemed significant.

However, he was not so fixated that he failed to notice Nagamaki clumsily stumbling into the glen, trailing blood from the mangled stump of her tail. The way Setebos's tired eyes bore into her was like he was looking through her, like he was breaking her down into a composite list of symptoms and diagnoses.

(Signs of blood loss. Possibly venous. -- Change in balance - might be a result of the patient's missing tail, or symptomatic of blood loss. Maybe both. -- Tail is missing. -- No visible signs of poisoning; will need further observations before passing judgment.)

Nagamaki's wisecracking, even though it was only at her expense, and was certainly motivated by good intentions, only deepened the scowl on Setebos's face. Oh, har-dee-effing-har. He didn't dignify Nagamaki's gallows humor with any sort of response, not even deadpan disapproval -- just a vaguely disappointed, nonplussed stare, with all the friendliness of a shotgun barrel leveled between the eyes. The worst response a wannabe comedian could possibly receive was dead silence.

"Come over here," Setebos ordered. He reached off to the side with a paw and retrieved a few dried cayenne peppers. He tossed them into a bowl and started pulverizing them with a crude stone whisk, until the peppers started to break apart into clumps of bright orange dust. "If you made it here, you can handle a couple more steps." A missing tail was no laughing matter, but the girl was fortunate. She could have been missing a leg, an eye -- something that could easily hemorrhage and become so severe that not even Setebos would be able to save her. Xenia was probably asleep, and the girl deserved some well-needed rest. He wasn't going to wake her over this.

« Last Edit: March 21, 2016, 04:29:59 AM by Sunblink »

Logged

This old warship has woundsAnd it won't sail for nothin'The old sailor said to meAnd I was foolish not to listenAnd paid such close conscriptionAll the lies I believed

"But if you lend me some more laborAnd put your name on paperWe just might catch a breeze"I know now he was not a captainNow because of all my actionsI grow alone with the sea

Ah, so not only had she had the bad luck of this little mishap, but her doctor seemed to be the grumpy sort, too! And here she had been so careful to make sure her blood trail didn't obviously lead straight to the infirmary. The grim healer stared at her and her smile faded slightly. So much for that.

He gave a brisk order, and she simply sighed and obeyed. He was right: she could manage the last few steps. She still felt shaky, but not nearly as much as the walk over here. Maybe it was because it was only a few more steps? Regardless, she came over to him, so that he could patch her up more easily. "Alright, alright," she said once she'd arrived, "I'll cut the funny talk. I get it."

From there she was silent. He hadn't said to sit up, so she allowed herself to lay down. It was easier on her, and avoiding exertion at this point was probably ideal. If he had a problem, he could tell her. For now she'd cross her forepaws and try to focus on something else

than the smell of blood and the PAIN.

Oh, she was used to pain, knew how to deal with it, but there was a certain amount of raw physical truth that could not be denied. The mind could only rule over the flesh to a certain degree, and the pain here was something so primal it defied denial. God, she hated Saboro, and she hated that she hated them for this and not every other atrocity. The pain just crawled up in her and killed everything else.

"Hey, doc, can I ask a favor?" She said, voice hoarse with the pain. "Can you just, crap, I dunno, talk? I don't care about what. You can lecture me for all I care. I just wanna hear something. As a distraction." Another time she might say please, try to be more coherent, but she figured the way she let her muzzle dip slightly and her eyes focus on a random patch on the ground would say enough.

Once Nagamaki adopted a more cooperative demeanor, Setebos issued a low, dismissive grunt, satisfied that he did not need to add a wounded ego to the laundry list of Nagamaki's injuries. Nagamaki limped toward him, or rather zigzagged in a direction that approximately pointed to him, and flopped down on her stomach. Seeing that Nagamaki demonstrated none of the symptoms associated with Saboro's poisons, Setebos left the white clover tea alone for the time being, and set to making another concoction.

He grabbed a bushel of cayenne peppers from the healers' personal reserve, noting that they would need to collect more. Urgently. Inaria's warriors were too preoccupied to play fetch with the Healers, but in the absence of any able-bodied volunteers, Setebos himself was willing to venture into hostile territory to gather supplies. Fortunately, he still had quite a few to tide over the next few patients, and more importantly, to rectify the immediate crisis. He fell back into the ingrained process of grinding the cayenne into powder, proceeding to Nagamaki's side with the bowl in possession.

Tolerating the pain proved to be more difficult than Nagamaki apparently anticipated, so when she summoned the energy to speak, she had an unusual request. Or, rather, it wasn't too unusual. Talking to patients often helped them to stay grounded. The problem was that Setebos was not one who often sought out conversation, especially with strangers, and with nothing from which to draw inspiration. Nagamaki had asked him to do the one thing that he was incapable of doing.

"Alright," he mumbled begrudgingly. "Let's talk, then." Scooping up some of the cayenne powder, he moved to coat Nagamaki's bleeding wounds with it. "This is gonna sting."

As he circled her, bombarding her with blasts of powder, he tuned out her noises of discomfort as he tried to stir up his equivalent of riveting conversation. "Tell me what you did today." A pause, before he dumped a fistful of the substance onto Nagamaki's severed stump. He trained an eye on it as he waited for the bleeding to slow, and then stop. Once it had enough time to air out, he would start bandaging it. "...Besides losing your tail."

« Last Edit: May 05, 2016, 01:21:26 AM by Bee Toss »

Logged

This old warship has woundsAnd it won't sail for nothin'The old sailor said to meAnd I was foolish not to listenAnd paid such close conscriptionAll the lies I believed

"But if you lend me some more laborAnd put your name on paperWe just might catch a breeze"I know now he was not a captainNow because of all my actionsI grow alone with the sea